Yeah, but there were only 2 scenes with a total of like 4 minutes of screen time, so that doesn’t give their dire situation the gravity it needed before you resort to immolating your children.
Stannis should have been knocking up 3 different prostitutes every night ever since he declared Joffrey was a bastard. They could have a conveyor belt of babies into a bon fire.
That’s it: Stannis is no longer the Mannis.
The big question is, how will Davos react?
The show definitely portrayed that as a villainous act and esp since it showed he doesn’t believe it and has used that to show Stannis as someone who’ll just kill anyone to further his ambition (whereas in the book, Stannis doesn’t even really want the crown, he just sees it as his duty and feels he can save others from the Lannisters by doing so).
I don’t think we got enough political background about whoever it was he burned back in season 2 to come to that conclusion. Generally speaking, burning a bunch of people who are related to you makes it HARDER for you to gain power because you just killed a bunch of your supporters and pissed off a bunch of others. You might kill people near you to gain power if you were killing people with a better claim to the throne than you have, or rivals for your power, but we have no reason to think that’s what happened.
Or is the argument that he decided that pretending to believe in the Lord of Light (a foreign religion) would somehow further his personal aims, and was willing to cynically kill people who were nonbelievers as part of a false show of piety? That also seems like an odd choice.
What happens to Stannis (and Melisandre) when he realizes he’s not Azor Ahai?
I’m starting to think the Lord of Light is just as hands off as the rest of the “good” gods.
Stannis, his burnt sword and Melisandre are all serving the Great Other and don’t have the ability to look at their actions outside of their worldview. The un-believer, Stannis and the believer, Melisandre both think they’re good and right and that’s the only thing that matters.
More like letting Melissandre do what she wants would allow her to use her powers in furtherance of the throne.
In the books, roughly equivalent to the time period shown in the 6/7 episode, are the inhabitants of Westeros used to thinking “of course magic will come to the rescue of starving people if a child is burned alive”…?
…Because in the television series, this has NOT been established. In the television series, most people of Westeros have no daily experience of magic nor any expectation that human sacrifice will result in goodies.
(So this plot development seems particularly badly-written.)
But Stannis thinks it will work. And if it does work, that will make all his soldiers believe too (and be grateful to him for saving them). If it doesn’t work, they’ll all be dead in a few weeks.
(Although I’m kind of assuming that if it “works”, it will be something fairly obviously surprising like an instant and unexpected break in the weather, clearly of supernatural origins… things could get dicier if Stannis ends up winning through some moderately unlikely but not obviously miraculous turn of events, and he claims that it was because of the sacrifice, but others don’t believe him.)
I’ve moved this post from the “show only discussion” to this one.
Get pissed off and go off looking for Rickon. You might remember Rickon from such shows as THIS ONE. Maybe he’ll stop by White Harbor to see how those pies are coming.
I’m nearly certain Shireen isn’t surviving the books, and I was certain before last night too. So her dying wasn’t exactly a spoiler. D&D did not say that GRRM explicitly said that Stannis would do it himself under similar circumstances as the show. The how and why and when and by whom of her death is still very much a mystery. I think they shouldn’t hide behind private So Spake Martin, though. They have deviated so much that they can’t pull “it will happen in the books” out now. Plus even if it does happen, it did not happen IN THIS WAY and context matters. They don’t think context matters, but it really, really does.
It does. Stannis was clearly conflicted and agonizing over the decision, but the fact remains that he ordered it, and even briefly held back his wife when she had a change of heart and tried to come to their daughter’s aid. Only a monster would want a crown that came at such a price.
It sucks by Game of Thrones standards. Still better than most of what is on TV.
Some things I haven’t liked:
Constantly trying to one-up the “Holy fuck did you see last night’s episode!” factor. Every episode can’t be a Red Wedding.
The Sands Snakes story line plays like an episode of Xena: Warrior Princesses of Dorn.
Too much time spent watching Arya not do anything at Faceless Man Academy
The Unsullied have not impressed me in combat. In fact, I have no sense of the strength of Dany’s army, the Sons of Harpys, the freed slaves or the Masters.
Drogon did not seem to be the game-changing army destroying weapon of war I had come to expect of a dragon.
I’ve lost interest in the goings-on in King’s Landing
That is because he LANDED.
In combat Drogon would not only be a one dragon army, he would inspire psychological dread.
He would just swoop out of the sky raining down death, make pass after pass until everyone was dead.
The only hope of taking him down would be placing trebuchets and enormous projectile weapons around, maybe some kind of large harpoon anchored to the ground? And this would assume you get lucky, it would take YEARS for warfare to adapt to what is essentially a flying flamethrower.
I think a better tactic might be having archers firing randomly in hopes of taking out the rider, which might only infuriate Drogon. Now you have a directionless death machine feral!
It’s not just the crown. Stannis thinks he’s destined to save all of humanity.
Even if it was the crown, they were stuck and starving. If this doesn’t work then they all starve to death in the snow so he’d have died anyway.
If you consider the story of how the original Azor Ahai sacrificed his wife to forge Lightbringer, then having Stannis sacrifice, or at least being told to by Melisandre, Shireen(or Selyse) isn’t all that surprising.
Too bad that story never made in to the show. :dubious:
I honestly don’t think that’s been an issue this season. Sure there was a big awesome zombie fight last episode, but what was there before that? Not like every episode has been ending with increasingly big shock scenes or something. (I guess arguably Sansa’s rape before that, but that’s still only two episodes in a row.)
And a guy getting his head chopped off is comic relief.
The unsullied are elites soldiers because they feel neither fear nor pain and are trained from early childhood in fighting. But fighting together as a cohesive unit. This makes them unstoppable fighting another army since they never panic and they never break and they never flee and can keep fighting past things that would drop normal men. It doesn’t make them into an effective police force, which is what Dany is using them as. The most powerful army in the world having problems dealing with a local insurgency using guerrilla tactics really shouldn’t be something people have trouble buying at this point.
Oh sure, we laugh now. But how much would you chuckle if you knew his backstory? How hard would you guffaw once you learned that 20 years ago, his sister was raped and murdered by that other fighter? That her children, his nieces and nephews, were killed! That he had secretly been in talks with Hizdahr zo Loraq and had convinced him to go to the Queen so as to open the fighting pits once more solely for the purpose of fighting the man responsible? Were we not so enthralled with the banter of Tyrion and Daario, we’d have heard this man’s cries of triumph at every knick taken off the one called The Pyramid That Sails. This man, the Maroon Scorpion, had victory in the palm of his hands. But fate was fickle that day and he lost his head for it. Do we mourn? Nay. We move on to the next scene with a smile on our face. For shame.
For shame on us all.
This. Stannis believes he’s the only one in power who recognizes the threat of the Others, and if he doesn’t quickly seize (his perfectly legitimate and righteous) power, all humanity will soon perish. He’s willing to sacrifice his only begotten daughter to save all mankind.
Me? I’d rather let humanity burn than torch my own kid, but hey I’m just this guy.